The Laser at 60: Ursula Keller

For its May 2020 print article “The Laser at 60,” OPN interviewed a range of OSA Fellows to get their insights on some particularly interesting insights in laser research today. We’re presenting a selection of those interviews online. Below is an edited version of our interview with Ursula Keller of ETH Zurich, Switzerland.
Keller, the winner of OSA’s 2020 Frederic Ives Medal/Jaris W. Quinn Prize, has been at the front ranks of scientists pushing laser pulses to ever shorter timescales, and thereby to illuminate ever-finer-scale processes in chemistry and physics. Her accomplishments range from the invention of the semiconductor saturable absorber mirror (SESAM), which enabled passive mode-locking of diode-​pumped solid-​state lasers, to frequency-comb stabilization, to advances in few-cycle pulse generation—all of which have driven or enabled key advances in attosecond science.